1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an audio recording apparatus, audio recording method and audio recording program, and is preferably applied to an Integrated Circuit (IC) recorder which encodes audio and then records encoded audio on a semiconductor memory, for example.
2. Description of Related Art
An IC recorder is designed to collect sound from around it through a microphone. The IC recorder transforms sound into encoded data, and then records the encoded data on a semiconductor memory. Especially, the IC recorder is designed to be light and small in size for ease of carrying. Therefore, a user can record sound in various places such as conferences and lecture meetings.
With this kind of IC recorder, the storage capacity of the semiconductor memory is limited to 128 MB for example. Therefore, the IC recorder encodes and records sound at a low bit rate such as 32 kbps (Sampling rate: 8 kHz, Quantifying bit number: 4 bit) in monaural format under the assumption that a user records mainly conversation between persons for listening to it later. In this manner, the IC recorder maintains the quality of sound so that a user can understand what the conversation was about. In addition, the IC recorder can record audio for a long time.
Some of the IC recorders connect to a personal computer through a Universal Serial Bus (USB) cable. In this case, a user can edit audio data stored in the IC recorder by controlling the personal computer (see Jpn. Pat. Laid-open Publication No. 2004-264912 [Pages 8 to 9, and FIG. 3], for example).